


To share a heart (perchance to live)

by the_consulting_linguist (xASx)



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, BAMF John, Developing Sherlock Holmes/John Watson, Drug Use, Eventual Happy Ending, Hospitalization, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Major Character Injury, Mental Health Issues, Metaphors, Mind Palace, Not Canon Compliant, POV Alternating, Redbeard was a dog, Sherlock Whump, Some things may a be a little on a metaphysical side but who cares, Symbolism, They are stupid but they love each other, Trauma, You might find yourselves confused at first as to what is happening, everyone is a mess, is it?, that was intentional, tld
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-02
Updated: 2019-05-25
Packaged: 2020-02-16 00:50:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 7,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18680755
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xASx/pseuds/the_consulting_linguist
Summary: It had been weeks at first. When the first month came and went, he had still been in denial. In shock. When the second month came, it had begun to sink in: alone. He was alone now. Alone. At the third month, it was anger. And now, well into the fifth month since John had given him his last message through Molly, all that was left was a numb… nothing.'Anyone but you'Sherlock still remembers his phone number by heart -although he is sure John changed it. Like his email. His address. His life. Mycroft tried to reason with him at first, but when John threatened to disappear entirely lest the Holmeses left him alone, Sherlock had asked him to stop. What Sherlock dreads is how these details that do not matter anymore remain, when the details of John’s face seem to be ebbing away from his mind’s grasp. It had happened before, in his two-year-long hiatus. But now, no return would bring them together again, for the memory to be renewed.-Until it would...





	1. Was he dying, was he even alive still?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 'List. Did you make a list?'

Light.

Too much light.

Over his head.

Blinding.

A groan. His body trying to sit up, push will back into shaky muscles.

Light was digging into his eyes. Its white lashing into his brain.

It hurt.

He lurched again, fumbled for a switch -it’s here, it must be here! The wall’s plaster grainy and cold under his fingertips, paint chipping against his nails. But it was near. He was moving.

He was.

Or he thought he was.

Suddenly there was no sense of touch. There was nothing there.

Eyes screwing shut, he tried more. In his body, inside his mind. Straining. Reaching. Until his breath was cut short, and he collapsed in on himself, falling back onto the ragged sheets of his bed. Tangled. Torn. Not changed in months, clammy and stiff with sweat, overuse.

There was a hole torn through him.

He had never before felt his heartbeat in the chattering of his teeth. Or that rush in his ears, as if a stormy ocean was trapped in each one. With a clumsy, awkwardly heavy hand he covered his eyes. Found some relief at last, in the trembling of darkness that was his palm.

Some part of him told him to catalogue the symptoms. Pull himself together. Was he dying, was he even alive still? He had to find out, do something, cry out, find his phone, call- another part of his mind, sweet-bitter and lulling, just whispered ‘what for?’, and froze him to the core.

His ears started to ring.

There was nothing. Not for a while. He had no idea how long. But then, he felt his toes and fingers, every joint of him, throb. And he, tingling whole, registered the flutter in his chest. Every breath was a struggle, labouring to push his ribcage up, and then escape through an emaciated stomach, a clenched throat, out of a pair of swollen, sealed together lips.

_List. Did you make a list?_

A moan of pain.

_Did you make a list, brother mine?_

The voice was not really there, he knew. A mere hallucination. As frustrating and unnerving as the real one would be. Much more painful because it wasn’t. Mycroft was not there. Mycroft or… anyone.

 _Anyone_.

 _Anyone but you_.

No, he mouthed.

_Anyone. He’d rather have anyone but you._

No, he tried again, but it was no use. The words kept swirling, each a sting, drawing blood again and again. Pulling more to the surface in their wake.

_An oath. You swore it._

No!

_Swore it swore it swore it!_

Shut up!

_You machine!_

_Freak_

The gun and the bullet; candles and lavender and _heartbreak;_ a vow, a punch, a blow, a snarl; a stranger in the eyes he thought he knew; a fire and a bomb and a cell in the dark, a sniper on the roof, and the devil’s smile over the gun -and _her_ , her her her, the liar, the threat, in _white_ , white, white-

He cried out. He felt he did. But no sound came.

The damned… Damned…! What did he have to do for it to… fucking… go… away?!

He pressed his hand into his eye sockets until the pressure made him feel faint yet again.

There was no relief. None until he curled into a ball of tattered clothes and limbs, his nose against his knees.

It hurt. Why did it hurt?

Something should have been there, in the emptiness, where it hurt. Some _one_.

He needed him. Need. Ugly and raw and paralysing. Need, that threatened to swallow him whole.

But that someone, that one, was gone.

Gone.

And how would he find him here?

How would he find him where even Redbeard failed?


	2. "The bloody door. Can’t you hear it?”

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He would know that voice anywhere.

“Sherlock? Can you hear me?”

Wiggins. Of course. He forced his eyes open, waited until they focused on the younger man’s face. There were black spots in his vision that would not go away, and he wondered just how much he had been pressing the heel of his palms against his eye sockets.

“Yes”, he said, each sound in the word vague and clumsy.

“You said you wouldn’t”

“What?”

“You said ‘no more for today’” Wiggins exclaimed. “If you wanna die on me, at least warn me first. Don’t want your brother-”

“My brother doesn’t- care…”, he mumbled. He shook his head. Licked his dry lips. Felt his chest, kicked his legs out and painstakingly slowly, as if he were a cut off log trying to become whole again with its stump, sat up. Not dead then. His heartbeat was still erratic beneath his fingers, but the booming sensation, and the chattering, had passed for now. And his chest had managed not to explode.

Wiggins was saying something. He shook his head again and hummed in question. The blond man groaned but quickly re-composed himself, then repeated his words -failing to mask his frustration: “You never said it was that bad”

Sherlock waved a hand dismissively. Since when did Wiggins take any interest in that -and not the free supply of morphine he secured for both of them? “It’s… not”, he slurred with a huff. “Do we have tea?”

Wiggins left his room with a storm of muttered curses under his breath.

Well, noone’s keeping him against his will, Sherlock thought.

 _And then what?,_ was what he refused to think about.

On pure will alone, against the dizziness that threatened to overwhelm him with every step, he hobbled to the living room. Papers and photographs and newspaper clips were crawling over every available surface, strewn over the floor where that was not enough. The windows were foggy, from some experiment gone wrong sometime ago, as none had bothered to clean them. The curtains were tattered in places -due to some other experiment, or maybe some peculiarly and particularly angry mood or hallucination, Sherlock could not recall. Couch and pillows alike were sliced open and punctured in too many places to count, and the smiley face on the wall had another bullet lodged between its eyes. The tapestry had come off the wall in places, hanging aimlessly with its lilies now drooping. His violin lay broken on the desk, beside his laptop, which was the sole survivor of the chaos. It was as if a whirlwind had been let loose in the flat. And was now trapped in its owner. The only one remaining of two…

There had been cases at first. As long as Lestrade was willing to indulge him. But soon, even he could not bear how thin his grip on sanity was getting, just how bad his need for new cases was becoming; he’d ask for ten more and have another ten piled up and pending. “Why don’t you take a break”, the DI had said. “Why not try to talk to him?”. Him. John. As if he would ever want to listen. As if he would ever allow it. No… There was no John anymore. And when there were no cases either, it had been obvious what the last resort would be.

Sherlock sought the Union Jack pillow amidst a stack of discarded pieces of evidence and microscope slides and rugs. It was singed a little at one edge, it was definitely in need of a good cleaning. But he clutched it to his chest nonetheless, pressed it against the bullet wound that had started to hurt yet again. It was a survivor too. The only thing left of _him_.

It had been weeks at first. When the first month came and went, he had still been in denial. In shock. When the second month came, it had begun to sink in: alone. He was alone now. Alone. At the third month, it was anger. And now, well into the fifth month since John had given him his last message through Molly, all that was left was a numb… nothing.

Sherlock still remembers his phone number by heart -although he is sure John changed it. Like his email. His address. His life. Mycroft tried to reason with him at first, but when John threatened to disappear entirely lest the Holmeses left him alone, Sherlock had asked him to stop. What Sherlock dreads is how these details that do not matter anymore remain, when the details of John’s face seem to be ebbing away from his mind’s grasp. It had happened before, in his two-year-long hiatus. But now, no return would bring them together again, for the memory to be renewed.

“Where’s the tea?”, he called, his fists crumpling the pillow. When there was no answer, he threw ig away with a snarl. “Wiggins?!”

“Door!”

“What does that got to-”

“Shezza. The bloody door. Can’t you hear it?”

Sherlock stopped his murmuring, mouth agape. He strained to listen, and there it was. Knocking, strong and sharp, on the main entrance one floor down.

“I’m not getting that”, Wiggins said, his eyes nervously darting from Sherlock to the door of 221B and back.

Sherlock scowled. If it was a friend of Mrs. Hudson’s she’d get it. If not, whoever it was could go to hell, for all he cared. “It will stop”, he said, and fumbled for the discarded pillow again.

It didn’t.

The knocking came in steady raps, three at a time. One, two-three. Staccati, the last one in triplet louder than the first.

“It’s not stopping”, Wiggins said.

Sherlock realised he was holding his breath. He exhaled with a snapped “I know that, you idiot”

Neither of them made to move. Instead, both kept their eyes fixed on the direction of that sound, that was demanding to be heard. And then a voice, much less sure, much less strong but _there_.

“Sherlock? Sherlock are you there? Please…”

He would know that voice anywhere.

 _John_.


	3. Stupid. Ever so stupid.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John never pleaded. Not easily. Not like that.

The world was small. Small enough to be spinning. Around him. Inside him. And the only constant point in this spiralling madness was that voice. John’s voice calling his name.

 _Please_.

John never pleaded. Not easily. Not like _that_.

It was only a whisper, but still made Sherlock want to close his eyes and hide away. There was a grave on that whisper. An empty grave and a tombstone of carved black marble; its reflection shrouding a crying, broken soldier.

 _Will you do this? For me, Sherlock_.

_Stop it. Just… stop this._

He opened his eyes. The pines weren’t there, or the crushed, soft grass beneath his feet. And the air he breathed was heavy, crowded, humid, not cold and open and earthy. But he could still _see_ it all on the edges of his vision, could hear the distant sobs, and then the silence itself. Blinking, he looked at his hands. The left was shaking.

The voice, _his_ voice, did not say anything more.

His heart kicked against his breastbone, and, as if the tether keeping him still snapped, he raised his head.

Wiggins shook his head ‘no’, even though Sherlock had not told him anything, and took a step back, retreating into the kitchen. There was a panicked look about him. “He can’t see _me_ here”.

Sherlock hesitated for a moment, as if he would argue the point. Then turned towards the door of 221B.

Made it to the landing, a hand grasping the bannister tight.

He stopped.

Five months of saving and guarding every last morsel of every memory of him, five months which he had accepted would turn to an eternity (or until he died anyway); and now he could see _all_ of him?

He sat down on the last step, his legs numbed from the knee down as if they were sliced off his body. A cold fist gripped his belly and squeezed as if to pluck it out of him. “I can’t do it”. It was obvious. Final. Impossible.

Moments passed, seconds, minutes. Blank. Beads on a string, following his heartbeat. Until the whirlwind inside him produced a single, coherent thought; _John would go._

He had been separated from him more times than he dared to count -the fall, the return, the wedding. Each of them hurt, in a raw, lasting, ugly way, like an infected wound. But he had thought that, with so many of them, each had turned him into stone, more and more; until, now, another separation could not possibly hurt.

He thought wrong.

It did hurt, and it did so sharply, without warning or preamble, so that he breathlessly fumbled to hold his chest, the wound, as if it had been pierced anew.

He devoured the rest of the stair, stumbling more than once on his way down but not stopping; as if his body would go on even if it fell. As if he would fight, dig, _crawl_ his way to the front door. To the man waiting behind it. He threw the door open, would have pulled it clean off its hinges if he could.

John wasn’t there.

All the energy that had propelled him forward now slammed against that realisation and dissipated. Sherlock swallowed, and leaned against the doorframe as his body now caught up with the ordeal he had put it through. His temples were pulsing even louder than his heart, and he had to squeeze his eyes shut against a wave of dizziness and nausea. The darkness was welcome to that sight of the empty pavement.

Chance missed. No. _Wasted_.

Stupid. Ever so stupid.

 _Why don’t you just die_.

There was a stop-start feeling. Like an old tape machine, trying to rewind, but getting stuck. Spitting the used innards of the tape out.

“Sherlock!”

There were steps first. Flat slaps against the pavement. Running. He opened his eyes, slowly. Saw John -strong, exhausted, _anguished_ John- running towards him from the end of the street.

Running?

“Oh my god, Sherlock!”


	4. Like a child that had seen a ghost.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "I tried calling", John choked. "I was calling. Where were you?"

John was running. Towards him. His every step closer made Sherlock's heart thrum; and the fear grow. The fear that he would stop, and look at him with those glassy, angry eyes. As if he did not recognise him. And then he would turn on his heel and walk away, just as he had been doing before.   
  
It would feel like the last time. The memory was thick with Bart's chemical smell, the whir of the ventilator, the drug-den's filth on his own clothes and body. John's words finding their aim as well as any sting, harsh as swords demanding to be parried.   
  
_You could have called. You could have talked._   
  
But now, when John came to a halt three steps below him, it was against London's hum and morning air. And when Sherlock searched for the telltale signs of John's anger, he found none. He found instead a face carved with lines and too little sleep, found that the hair that should have been blond had been tainted silver. Found wide eyes seeking his; and what was alive and writhing deep inside them, as if it had grown roots that drank too deep, was _fear_. "Are you alright? Sherlock?" The words were hoarse. He was ashen, out of breath and not caring to snatch it back. Like a child that had seen a ghost.   
  
Sherlock blinked at him. He felt as if he had rehearsed his lines, his role, over and over, only to find the script had changed, without him knowing until the moment he set foot on the stage.   
  
"I tried calling", John choked. "I _was_ calling. Where were you?"   
  
"My phone. Um. I... I lost it". He hugged his torso, hid his trembling left hand.   
  
John was here. With a sense of doom biting at his heels, but he was _here_. They were from what-ifs and the blind imaginings of this meeting to the brunt, inescapable reality of it. Sherlock felt dizzy.   
  
But wasn't that what he wanted? Even though he had stopped actively wanting, because wanting meant doing other treacherous things like dreaming or hoping, there was not a world in which John would return to him and he would refuse him.   
  
And yet, nothing was right, nothing was the _same_.   
  
_Anyone but you.  
_  
He hadn't imagined it. The pain, the numbness, the empty nothing of all these months, it was real. _Real_. He was sure of it.   
  
He tried to find John's eyes, only to realise that he couldn't. There was nothing for him to see. As if all the light had been snuffed out by the memory of those words. Blinking changed nothing. Move. He couldn't _move_.   
  
"Sherlock?"  
  
_Anyone but you._  
  
"Sherlock!"  
  
The darkness that had gripped him lifted, as quickly as it had overwhelmed him.   
  
John was watching him. And as he did, the fear and worry in his eyes hardened into something coarser. The distance between them was gone in three strides. The wound in Sherlock’s chest kicked.   
  
"What the hell have you done, Sherlock?", John breathed, his voice tight. Sherlock wanted to shrink away from it. But before he could, John had taken his left hand, as if in a handshake, and pulled it towards him. Then, with his free hand, pulled Sherlock's sleeve up.   
  
There was no denying the marks on his skin. Purplish-black blotches over his wrist, his forearm, the crease of his elbow. No denying their cause, the driving force beneath it. Even if John did not comprehend it in its entirety.   
  
Sherlock had known it would come to this, sooner or later. So now braced for it once more, sent his gaze away. Heard John's heavy breathing, tight and through the nose, as if he were struggling to keep himself in check. Felt the smaller palm holding his, sweaty but firm as steel. Warm.   
  
But wasn't that what he wanted? As if he did not know how it would end. Yet again.   
  
John inhaled sharply, and let go. Straightened his back as if standing on attention, his face set in a grimace of resolve. When he spoke, his voice was low; a warning. That there was no room for voicing any sort of disagreement. "We're going to go up. And I am going to take care of those. And then we are going to talk"  
  
Sherlock nodded.

How could he not have known?


	5. Oddities

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John looked at him, really tried to pin him down with his gaze, as if Sherlock was made of mist, or fraying at the edges.

Sherlock led the way, down the hall. It was dark, the air stale. He noticed how the plaster on the wall had seen better days, the wallpaper's colours were washed off, the carpet had been worn thin. If it had been like this before, he had not seen it. And if it had not been... An ominous feeling swirled in his belly, and the hairs at the back of his neck stood on end; it was almost as if the building was much older than it looked, on shaky foundations. A perfectly deceptive husk, polished on the outside and rotting on the inside. 221B had never before seemed as claustrophobic. He wondered if John saw what he saw, and how his expression would be if he did. It was as though he needed to know what John felt to understand what he himself did. But he dared not turn to look over his shoulder. He heard him, his steps, his breath, right behind him, and that was proof enough.  
  
It should have been the only familiar thing in a sea of unfamiliarity, John rushing up the stairs of 221B behind him. It was laden with memory; the thrill of the chase, excitement bubbling in their throats until it turned to laughter. Or, the prospect of a warm home, and dinner in front of the telly, and togetherness after the adrenaline had washed away, or the fatigue had taken over. But now it seemed misplaced. Odd. Tainted by all the other oddities that his life had become an assortment of.  
  
_Wiggins_.  
  
He paused at the landing. The kitchen door was left ajar. He leaned closer and peeked into the room.  
  
Noone was there.  
  
Not at the corridor, the bathroom, his bedroom. All doors were open, like pauses in time. And though perhaps, someone could still have hidden and remained unseen despite this...  
  
John, who had waited behind him at first, stood by his side. "What is it? What's wrong?", he asked, his eyes scanning the semi-lit flat too.  
  
"Nothing", Sherlock mumbled. His left hand jerked, and he pressed its thumb against his throbbing breastbone.  
  
_I swear he was here._  
  
He made for the living room. There was scarcely place to sit there, given the chaos. On impulse, he threw piles of evidence and samples off the couch in a sweeping motion, uncaring for how they scattered to the floor. John followed him unhurriedly. Taking it all in, from floor to tattered wall to ceiling to the things he tried not to step onto. The expression on his face was halfway between puzzlement and horror, as he came to stand in the middle of the room. His lips moved, as if to form a word, but he just shook his head instead. Sherlock waited for him to react, for that repressed anger to break through to the surface. But John only said, when the initial shock seemed to ease its grip on him, "Do you still have the medkit?"  
  
"Yes"  
  
John looked at him, really tried to pin him down with his gaze, as if Sherlock was made of mist, or fraying at the edges. Both knew that the medkit had nothing that could help with the trackmarks on his arms, and the void inside him which had put them there.  
  
John fetched it anyway. It was still in the bathroom, as it had always been.  
  
He had Sherlock him sit on the now freed couch, and pull up his sleeves. The trackmarks were ugly to look at with John's gaze also on them, so Sherlock looked away. There was little to be done about the bruising, but any open cuts or abrasions could be cleaned and dressed.  
  
John was silent as he worked, careful and calculated down to the rhythm of his breath.  His brow was furrowed, but he looked much less lost than he had done on the pavement, if gaunt still. Even though there was space on the couch, he had preferred to kneel on the floor in front of Sherlock and his outstretched arms, over which he was leaning. His expression was that of a man facing the demolished rubble that used to be his home, and bottling up all emotions save resolve, for he had to salvage what he could with his own bare hands because he knew no help would come.  
  
Sherlock swallowed. There was a tightness in his throat that would not go away. Five months of thinking John would never return could not go away. They were inside him, in his blood, in the destruction and neglect around them, in the air they breathed. They made his presence now alien, unsettling, when his had been the only presence that never should be any of these things. "Why are you here?"  
  
John did not stop wrapping a thin strip of white gauze around Sherlock's forearm. "You needed me"  
  
It had been nothingness. Emptiness. For days, weeks, nothing could arouse anything from him, nothing that reached any deeper than the surface. But what burst forth now, with no warning, was ugly and raw. "How did you know?", he sneered.  
  
John finally looked at him, but his face was blank. He could not comprehend the turmoil inside him. "I always know, you git"  
  
Sherlock felt his face harden. "Do you?"  
  
"Look what you've done to yourself, Sherlock"  
  
The wound on his chest throbbed with the words. What he had done to himself? Nothing at all, nothing yet, not nearly as much as he deserved to be done to him. And this man, this man knew that too. Why else would he send him away, snarling that he had made a vow he failed to keep?  
  
_Anyone but you anyone but you anyone but you._  
  
"You left me", he said through clenched teeth.  
  
John squinted, and then quickly shook his head, laughing. Laughing. "I have no idea what you're talking about"  
  
Sherlock's hands coiled into fists. "You told me to go away, all these months, you said you never wanted to see me again, because of what I had done, because I-" but when he reached inside, when he tried to find the words, the reason, there was nothing. Nothing but a mind-crushing fear of falling that made him tremble, a shadow where a name should be and a devil's smirk over a gun and white white _white_ , over the racing of his heart.  
  
"Sherlock!"  
  
He couldn't see. Why couldn't he see? He shook his head, but it made his ears buzz -and once the buzzing had begun, it could only grow louder and louder, until he could not hear the thrashing in his sternum, but he could feel it, like a ghost, a bomb ticking inside him. There was a weight over his chest, and no matter how much he tried to push it away, to claw at his own breastbone and tear it out, he couldn't, because he could not see where his hands were, could not feel them.  
  
"Sherlock! No, no, don't-"  
  
But it was far away. Too far away. It couldn't reach him. Not here.  
  
He was falling.  
  
_I'm sorry, Sherlock._  
  
"Sherlock! Please...! Wake up. You've got to wake up. You've got to wake up..."


	6. Mind gone to who knows where and body left behind

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He did not want to face the man standing at the door. Did not want to see the white mask hiding everything but his eyes, the white cap over his head. He did not want to see more white damnit, or hear the beeping of that blasted machine, see the foggy breaths the man on the hospital bed in front of him breathed into the oxygen mask. If he could will it all away. Stop it. Just... stop this. It was wrong. It was all wrong.

"You have to wake up"  
  
Small, and rasped. Fragments of a voice, like the rest of him was fragmented. It was the monitor that answered him. Each beat laborious, slow. So slow...  
  
"Doctor Watson"  
  
Fists clenching over a white sheet, face twisting into a grimace of pain. Of defiance. He turned his head the other way to hide it.  
  
"He has been stabilised for now. As long as there are no more complications, there is nothing more we can do"  
  
He did not want to face the man standing at the door. Did not want to see the white mask hiding everything but his eyes, the white cap over his head. He did not want to see more _white_ damnit, or hear the beeping of that blasted machine, see the foggy breaths the man on the hospital bed in front of him breathed into the oxygen mask. If he could will it all away. Stop it. Just... stop this. It was wrong. It was all _wrong_.  
  
It had all become a blur: how he found him, the ride in the ambulance, the hours spent pacing the narrow corridor outside the operating room, his bloodied hands too shaky and his face too ashen to be allowed in. Transformed into disembodied colours and sounds, some as if in slow motion and some fast enough to make him dizzy, the stomach-curdling memories prowled just at the back of his mind. It took as little as letting his mind go blank or staying still to rouse their hunger for cold, slippery _terror_. A terror black and intangible and yet devouring every other thought, a terror that grew and grew until his breath was snatched from him, and his knees went weak, and he could feel his skull about to burst open, unable to contain it.  
  
Sometimes it felt like a nightmare. He had that stop-start feeling that this was not real, and he was going to wake up any moment now, wake up, wake up. And every time he didn't, every time he looked down at the red, red, red that stained his hands, the realisation was colder than before.  
  
Sherlock. In front of him. On the hospital bed. Eyes closed, and the once fluffy curls matted, their shine snuffed out. It would have looked as if he was just sleeping, but for how his features were gaunt, tense. A swarm of buzzing, dripping wires and tubes that kept him alive protruded from his body, as if they were trying to make him part man and man machine. It looked as if he was in thought, mind gone to who knows where and body left behind. A body that seemed so frail, pale, _small_. Waiting; nothing more than a child, lost and hurt, and needing, god, needing to be brought home.  
  
"Doctor Watson... You are a colleague; you know the procedural protocol. Please come with me"  
  
Outside, he scrubbed his hands clean in the bathroom. Rubbed so harshly under the hot water that they were raw afterwards -and red, yet again. He clenched them into fists at his sides as he resumed pacing outside the ICU.  
  
It was his fault. He had left him alone. And the worst is, he did not even know why. He should have known such a thing would happen. But he had let his guard down, had believed for a moment that it could all be like before. Before. It made him angry because of how illogical it was, how stupid. If Sherlock had cracked before, then he had smashed it into pieces and set it on fire.  
  
It was too much. Too much that he had done wrong, too much that he had accepted without trying to shoulder the weight of their repercussions. And now all this weight had thrown him under. Crushing him. It was watching him, and it had an ugly, deformed smirk, and he hated it.  
  
"Doctor Watson"  
  
The steps must have preceded the man himself, but he had been too absorbed in his own self-loathing to hear them.  
  
He glanced up.  
  
Mycroft inclined his head. There was a warning in his eyes, cool and hard as stone. But it was not as composed as always. Was not detached from the world and its affairs haughtily towering above them. Its ice was frozen, suspended despair like a breath taken in but never exhaled; and the world had such a grip on him that it was in that gaze. It made John see all that had happened twenty hours ago yet again. He hastily looked away.  
  
"Tell me exactly what happened. Will you?"


	7. Like absence, like lack.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "I want to go home"

When his mind stirred, as if it were a rusty mechanism creaking back to motion, it  
was dark, yet again. A still, void-like dark, like that of a well's depths at night.  
  
What he noticed first: there was no panic. As if a film of fog had been placed between his conscious mind and the memory coiled under his ever-aching breastbone, turning it from a solid, terrifying thing he could peel back a shadowy veil to see, to something too fleeting for him to put his finger on. Oh, it was not _gone_ : it was ever there, patrolling, but now like a shark beneath the surface, easy to miss in the deep.  
  
The second thing he took in was how his body was his again. His to move and his to feel. He had full sensation of it, from the hair follicles on his head to his very toes. And it was all exhausted, throbbing feebly, as if it had been run over, mere roadkill by the pavement.  
  
There was something else there too, something annoying, nagging at him every time he tried to let it go. A beeping sound, ear-piercing and yet hollow on its final note. Again. Again. Again. It was infuriating -but even this infuriation was muddled down. He decided he should open his eyes and find a way to stop it. But his eyelids felt sore and glued together, as if they had puffed into now-deflated balloons. When he tried to move his hand, maybe to rub at them, he felt the skin stretching over the needle over his elbow. Surprised, he tried to move the other hand, to find out it was also similarly incapacitated. The smell kicked in last: chlorine-scrubbed linoleum. Disinfectant. Plastic. The sterile cotton scent of a thin sheet.  
  
He knew where he was.  
  
And he _hated_ every moment of it.  
  
Sherlock had never been fond of hospitals. Not when they had been a place of forced stays, faceless doctors ordering him around, and tired-looking nurses hating the extra load on their shift. There were others there who had not chosen to suffer and yet they did. While _he_ had. Hadn't he?  
  
"Sherlock?"  
  
He frowned, or hoped he did. John had brought him here?  
  
"Hey..."  
  
Finally obeying him, his eyes opened like cracking skin. It took some moments for his vision to clear away the blur, but surely enough, there he was. John was sitting on a chair by his bed. He looked even worse for wear than he had when he appeared at the doorstep of 221B. His cheek was red and lined -he must have been mushing it with a fist propping up his head- and his more-silver-than-golden hair messy. He looked like he had not slept in such a long while that sleep was now an unwanted option.  
  
"What happened?", he croaked -or at least tried to.  
  
"You had palpitations. Went into shock. Whatever bloody thing you had put in your body was too much" John said, his voice tight. "You were lucky. This time".  
  
"Lucky you were there"  
  
"Lucky you didn't _die_ , Sherlock", John clipped, but kept his voice at a whisper. "People die of less, even if they are found in time"  
  
He swallowed. There was a nasty aftertaste of copper and plastic in his mouth, as if he had been intubated. It made him feel sick to the core. The IV tubes were tethers, and the room was too small. John's gaze, as undecipherable as a mirror that showed no reflection, weighed down onto his chest. "I want to go home"  
  
Home. Not to 221B, not to what it had become, at least. The tattered, singed, chaotic husk of a flat. Not to anywhere that existed in the world, not anymore. Home to what had been. Before the five months without John, before he returned, before he left. To when it was just the two of them, against the rest of the world. To the wisps of memory his mind cradles in bloodied hands, because when he holds onto them too long, they turn sharp like glass, like absence, like _lack_.  
  
But John did not understand. He thought Sherlock disregarded it all and was only like a stroppy child, because his face twisted in a grimace. "How can you ask this, Sherlock? How can you say this _now_?"  
  
"John-"  
  
But John had already stood up, and put the chair away, and was heading for the door. And Sherlock could not help the feeling of dizziness again, of his stomach dropping to his feet. All he knew was that him being here, like this, was wrong; that John walking away was wrong. It was all wrong. And he could not change it. It was not in his hands. "Please"  
  
John must have heard him because he stopped, just as he had reached the door, and turned around. This time the way he looked at him showed something: sadness. But not sadness for him, not in the way of pity. In the haunting way of guilt. "Alright", he said, exhaling a slow breath. "Alright. As soon as you are cleared"  
  
There was a lump in his throat, but he nodded. Would John be here when that happened? The thought had not occurred to him before that John showing up unannounced did not necessarily mean that John was back. It made all the five months without him demand an answer right there and then. There was so little said between them and yet so much to say, an abyss he both wanted to cross and feared. It was something to latch onto, now.  
  
"Will you..."  
  
"Not now, Sherlock. Not now", John shook his head and was gone, leaving the door open. The corridor was dark.  
  
_Anyone but you._


	8. I left him

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Because he knew the other answer too. The one that was not straightforward. The one that was eating him up alive, the one blazing in Mycroft's otherwise icy eyes: 'Where were you?'

"What happened to my brother, Doctor Watson?", Mycroft asked again, when the first question had failed to elicit any response from the man in front of him.   
  
John kept looking at his feet. Forcing himself to find interesting the colour and shape of his shoes, the creases in their leather, their laces. It helped him to focus on something else, helped him in his effort to stay schooled in calmness. Because he knew what the straightforward answer to Mycroft's question would be. It was only three words, after all. He knew the medical answer too. Hated every word of it, because he had given it too many times already: during the ambulance call, to the paramedics’ team, to the surgeons, the nurse, a doctor. Each time, each explanation, only made what the words truly meant more real. Until it was tangible, a stone in his stomach, a fist around his own heart.  
  
_His heart._   
  
Because he knew the other answer too. The one that was not straightforward. The one that was eating him up alive, the one blazing in Mycroft's otherwise icy eyes: 'Where were you?'  
  
"I can't-" John wanted to believe he was not faint-hearted. After all, he had seen men being maimed, slaughtered, fallen men begging for his help with bulging eyes, amidst gunfire. And he had clenched his jaw and balled his fists and faced it. But he cowered now, in the face of this single truth. His inadequacy.   
  
_I left him alone. I left him._  
  
Mycroft tensed: John could see it in the way he planted his feet squarely on the white-tiled floor, and yet was restless on them. "I will not ask again". The straining patience of his tone was in itself a threat.  
  
John felt angry with him then. Angry that he was right, and that he was entitled to be, that he was entitled to his fear, and his frustration, and his anger, where John was not.   
  
John himself had lost that right, that entitlement: to worry, to fear, to be angry, and to feel he had someone to share these feelings in way of the solemn, silent support of people with a struggling loved one in the ICU uniting them. Mycroft now, and later Mrs. Hudson, Lestrade, even Molly: they would all be a unit, a front, against him. Against the man who bore the blame. Who had made the wrong choice.   
  
_I left him._   
  
And yet his face twisted into a nasty grimace, pulling the edges of his lips low.   
  
He could feel the gaze of the older Holmes on him. So like that of his brother, and yet so much more unwavering, calculating, in a different way. Sherlock Holmes read all about you. Mycroft Holmes read all about you, while never hiding that he would use it as best suited him, and just how little that would bother him.  Sherlock finding strengths, truths, lies, weaknesses could never completely lose the pompous flair and childish twinkle of a game. But Mycroft doing the same... John's neck crawled with the feeling that if skinning him alive would give him the answers he sought, Mycroft would have already had it done. So when he sighed a restrained, long, slow breath, John braced. Maybe some part of him wanted the scornful words that were about to be aimed at him, in fact. Deserved them.   
  
"Very well. In that case-"   
  
But then there were footsteps in the corridor: the heavy, syncopated footfalls of someone trying, and failing, to hold back from running. Mycroft straightened his back. John sniffed softly, pursed his lips, looked away. Neither man turned to the new arrival, not even as the Detective Inspector walked through the door.  
  
There was a pause: all three of them locked in place, silent. Mycroft's face had gone gaunt, his lips pressed to a tight line, like a scar.   
  
It was Lestrade that spoke first, a note of apology in his voice. "I came as quickly as I could"  
  
John watched as Mycroft exhaled slowly, and then, as if it cost him to do so, nodded in acknowledgement.   
  
"I have news", Lestrade began, but was cut off by another nod, curter and more forced than the one before it. "How is he?", he tried instead. John could not miss how he softened the words, as if to soften the inevitable blow of what they implied: the situation they were in. The thick, robotic hiss of the oxygen mask, the stitches down a struggling, emaciated chest, the countless tubes attached to the pale body, like the strings of a puppet. He pressed his eyes shut.  
  
"I have not been able to talk with his surgeons yet", Mycroft clipped.   
  
"Oh. I thought-"  
  
"You thought wrong, Detective Inspector", he said, defensively, and cast a cold look at John, who felt sweat prickle at the back of his neck, as if he were a cornered, wild thing. "I just arrived"  
  
John clamped his mouth shut. There was a feeling of his senses failing him, of too much white crowding his vision, and the need to bare his teeth in a snarl began to boil in his chest like panic.   
  
"Well", Lestrade said hurriedly, "there's some nurses downstairs we could ask". It was conciliatory, appeasing. And just when John thought it would not work, not on Mycroft, the older Holmes' shoulders sagged, and he mouthed a faint 'alright'.   
  
"John, you were with him, weren't you?" But he was not allowed enough time to reply, before Lestrade added "I will need a statement from you later, okay?"  
  
Yes. He nodded. Okay. Okay. Later. But he? Him? Sherlock, he wanted to shout. His name is Sherlock! But as the two men left without him, Mycroft's back losing its rigidity the more Lestrade's remained straight as they walked down the quiet corridor, even this mutinous anger felt pointless and pretentious.  
  
John tried to breathe. It was not over, but at least it was over for now, facing Sherlock's brother and Lestrade at least, for the first time in this new reality. And he had failed to admit the truth, to give an explanation, to be of any use at all. He had stood there like a coward, acted as if he was the stranger to Sherlock that he felt he had become. And as much as he despised himself for this, he could not help but feel that he deserved it: to be treated and seen as if that was who he was.   
  
_I left him._  
  
He dragged his steps to one of the folded plastic seats, as if sludging though quicksand, and let his body slump there, like an amorphous mass, a useless weight.  He had expected that, either he was aloof and practical or vibrating with nerves, he would somehow know what to do. But now, as he took in his austere surroundings -the blue horizontal stripe painted in the middle of the wall, the white linoleum tiles, the red no-smoking sign, the yellow door with the clear plastic panel that led to the ICU corridor- he had never felt more at a loss. When he looked at his hands, the left was shaking. Still raw. Still red.   
  
Time stretched and stretched, thin and sterile. As it used to do when he had lost him. When he had heard the crack of his skull against the pavement, seen the grey eyes like broken glass, like broken skies, blood flowing through the cracks.   
  
Something else had cracked that day too. Something he could not quite place. But since it had, no matter if they were together in the same room, they were not really there: Sherlock was not quite Sherlock, and he was not quite the same either. They were rusty, too slow or too quick. Or a little too torn and battered at the edges. At least, that is what he thought. That he could not clearly see him, or them, or himself, as if looking for it all at the bottom of a murky pond. How funny then that now that they were here, when it was not a game anymore, he felt that if he but tried, he could see them just fine. It was a kind of desperate, bittersweet clarity, revealing first the simplest of truths: their game always took two.   
  
John stood. With the exhausted dedication of the last soldier left on duty, left to patrol and guard. Knowing it was futile. He stood. Walked through that yellow door. Like a thief. Like a ghost. Found a mask, a cap, a basin and disinfectant to wash his hands. Found the room, and stepped inside, a shadow in the semi-darkness. He was greeted by the lonely beep of the heart monitor. It made him feel like he was drowning, like he wanted to be sick. There was a chair. He pulled it closer to the bed. He sat.


End file.
